Improve Your Blog

The first thing to do after signing up for a blog is to decide what you want your blog to be about. It is a good idea to grab a piece of paper and ask yourself a couple of questions like:

Who is going to read this? (Who is your target audience?)

What kind of information will you be posting?

Another thing you can do is to research other blogs and see what you like. Take down notes of things or pages you would like on your blog.

This information will help you choose a theme your target audience will relate to. It will also help you decide on what topics you want your blog to be about – whether that is a hobby, life experience, business or some other topic. Don’t have too many different topics on your blog as otherwise you may not reach your target audience. Topics that don’t interest your reader will put them off coming back to your website.

To change your theme on WordPress log in to your account, go to your Dashboard and in the Appearance menu it will have the topic Themes. Chose this and it will take you to the theme selection page.

Remember to choose something that will appeal to your target audience, but also something that is easy to read. Some of the themes will have writing in a colour that is hard to read on the background, stay away from red writing as a rule.

Once you have your theme sorted it is time to write your first post. It is best to do a draft first of all your blogs as this will stop you from posting rants that you may later regret. Use pen and paper or a word document so that you can cut and paste it in. Note that if you use Word some alterations may be needed once it is transferred to WordPress.

Blogs should be a maximum of 300 – 400 words, as any longer makes it harder for your reader to see the full article on their computer. So keep it short and sweet. Don’t post a blog about nothing in particular as this will deter your readers from coming back. If you have nothing to say, do NOT put up a post.

By now you should have your automated blog of Hello World that WordPress generates. Delete this and put up your own.

The reason being is that M’Word has style formatting and code that is happening invisibly that is also copied along with your text. This is bad, because the invisibleM’Word formatting code makes a mess of your blog/website’s HTML code that is working in the background of your site.

Great info Kelly, very handy resource! The tip about drafting in another program first
is a good tip and something I’ve done myself.

An added note:
When drafting your blog post in another text editor, where you intend to copy and paste into your blog CMS such as wordpress, it’s best NOT to use Microsoft Word.

The reason being is that M’Word has style formatting and code that is happening invisibly that is also copied along with your text. This is bad, because the invisible
M’Word formatting code makes a mess of your blog/website’s HTML code that is working in the background of your site.

Google and it’s spider bots hate that and is a hazard to search engines. Instead use the bare bones text editors ‘notepad’ or ‘wordpad’, to get around this and all should be good.